A Quiet Place: More Matsumoto to be released in English this summer

Too many invocations of one crime writer to describe another are silly, but Seicho Matsumoto really is reminiscent of Georges Simenon. This is true especially in his portrayals of dogged, unexceptional characters, bewildered, sometimes to the point of pathos, as they navigate the consequences of crimes they understand only dimly.

Matsumoto died in 1992, and little of his large output has been translated into English, so any new publication is welcome. A Quiet Place, out this summer from Bitter Lemon Press, is a noirish tale full of sparing but sharp observations and pointed critiques of postwar Japanese society.

The novel is reminiscent in that respect of Matsumoto's Points and Lines, which I named as one of my favorite international crime novels in the first Detectives Beyond Borders post back in 2006.

© Peter Rozovsky 2016

Zero Hour in Phnom Penh, and what one can learn from crime novels

Christopher G. Moore's novel Zero Hour in Phnom Penh, written based on travel to Cambodia during that country's administration by the United Nations in 1992 and 1993, is full of didactic and journalistic passages:

“`So I’m going to fill in a gap in your knowledge. We French have been here since the last century. We imported the Vietnamese to run the civil administration of the colony."

“`The French were in Cambodia for fifty years before they built the first school,'” said Calvino."

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Photos by your humble blogkeeper, Peter Rozovsky
except for the one obviously by someone else.

"This was Ratana’s Thai way of not just showing loyalty for her boss but taking a much larger step, bringing him into the kinship fold—where family looked after family, checking and double-checking on their safety, consulting with other family members."

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"Cambodia in the 90s was a second chance, a new frontier, a new gold rush. And guys like Hatch and Patten weren’t going to miss out this time around."

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"These strongmen had the unquestioned right over the peasant population. Who among them would have cared about the fate of one such girl? Hundreds of Khmers were stepping on land mines every day of every week, and it looked like that would keep on happening for the indefinite future."

Me and Christoper G. Moore
at Bangkok's Check Inn 99.

I would not like that sort of thing in most crime novels; I'll read a history book instead. But Moore has two things going for him: Cambodia is, in fact, a mystery to many, if not most, Western readers, who could use a bit of background, and he is forthright about his role as a cultural explorer or rather a cultural detective, to borrow the title he used for his book of reflections about life as a writer in Southeast Asia (a book to which I was honored to write the introduction).

So the didactic moments are pretty easy to get used to. Even if you disagree, you might like Moore's borrowings, of which one, when the protagonist, Vincent Calvino, finds a naked news reporter in his bed, is this:

 "She giggled. `You’re cute.'"

That just might remind you of Philip Marlowe and Carmen Sternwood in The Big Sleep.

© Peter Rozovsky 2015

Detectives Beyond Borders on stage in Bangkok

Good fun at Sunday evening's noir fiction event at Check Inn 99 in Bangkok. I took no pictures of the evening's featured interview because I was its subject, talking about noir, crime fiction, Southeast Asia, noir and crime fiction in Southeast Asia, crime conventions, and other interesting topics. Many thanks to my interlocutor (and my host in Bangkok), Christopher G. Moore, and to the crowd of writers and publishers of crime fiction in this part of the world. You'll be reading about some of them in the coming weeks at Detectives Beyond Borders.

Check Inn 99 has quite a past. Suffice it to say that while my interview and its follow-up audience questions were a blast, they were not the most exciting happenings in this site's history.

Tom Vater

Soi Cowboy (Photos by Peter Rozovsky)

One nice touch: Among the attendees was Tom Vater, who writes crime fiction, is one of the folks behind the Hong Kong-based Crime Wave Press, and also wrote the guidebook I am using for the Cambodia legs of my trip.

© Peter Rozovsky 2015

Who, what, when, where, and wai: Detectives Beyond Borders to talk crime fiction in Bangkok

If you happen to be in Bangkok on Nov. 15, I'll be appearing at a pretty special event there that evening.  The handbill for the event (above/right), to be held at Check Inn 99, says Christopher G. Moore will interview me, but I'll probably ask more questions than I'll answer.

Sunday 15 Nov 6-9pm. A special inaugural meetup hosted by Christopher G. Moore featuring Peter Rozovsky the man behind Detective Beyond Borders. Peter is a well known Crime Fiction Critic whose blog is read internationally.
 
A relaxed and informal atmosphere to hear about trends in international Noir hardboiled mystery novels and how the community of writers in South East Asia fit into this genre. This will be a chance to join others who share similar interests and to meet locally based Crime and Fiction Authors, ask questions and otherwise enjoy yourselves. This will follow on from the popular Sunday afternoon Jazz Jam at Checkinn99. Entertainment after from Music of the Heart Band. More details on https://www.facebook.com/bangkoknoirauthors.

** Reserve a table now **

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If you're in the area, Check Inn 99 is at 97 Sukhumvit Road, right across from the Landmark Hotel. See you there.  

Read about the Bangkok Noir short story collection at http://www.heavenlakepress.com/books/BangkokNoir.htm

© Peter Rozovsky 2015

Cambodia, crime, and history

Andrew Nette (right) with your humble blogkeeper
at Philadelphia's Noircon convention in 2014

I've been so immersed in such a welter of Cambodian history and crime fiction that I can't remember just which book is the basis for each of the following observations.

First, the books on which the observations are based:
1) Phnom Penh Noir, edited by Christopher G. Moore
2) A History of Cambodia, by David Chandler
3)  Pol Pot: Anatomy of a Nightmare, by Philip Short
4) Ghost Money, by Andrew Nette
5) The Pol Pot Regime, by Ben Kiernan

For one, at least two of the stories appear to include allusions, conscious or otherwise, to Casablanca. This makes sense; Casablanca was a refuge or a last stop for dubious sorts with agendas of their own from all over the world. So was Phnom Penh after Vietnam ousted the Khmer Rouge in 1979. Among the dubious sorts in Phnom Penh, living high amid the local squalor, were workers from non-governmental aid organizations. This is the heart of the first story in Phnom Penh Noir, by Roland Joffé. who directed The Killing Fields.

Second, orientation by landmark is less frequent than I expected in the stories set in Cambodia and written by foreigners, but it is nonetheless present. Without descending into travelogism, the stories will situate places in the story by their relation to major landmarks in a way I suspect native writers would not.

Third, the mutual enmity of Cambodians and Vietnamese, whose best-known manifestation in recent decades is probably Vietnam's 1979 invasion, may have its roots in conflict of countries that fell under the sway of Asia's two great ancient civilizations of India (Cambodia) and China (Vietnam).

Finally, to scramble the notions of native and foreigner, came "Broken Chains," a selection of rap poetry interspersed with biographical snippets in Phnom Penh Noir by Kosal Khiev, born in a Thai refugee camp, migrated to the United States as an infant, convicted of attempted murder, jailed for 14 years, then deported to Cambodia. Where does he belong?

While you ponder that question, here's Andrew Nette on Phnom Penh Noir and writing noir in Asia. 

© Peter Rozovsky 2015

សូមស្វាគមន៍មកកាន់ប្រទេសកម្ពុជា

I'm off to Cambodia in a few weeks, so first a shout-out to crime writers who live in Southeast Asia, set their novels there, or both: Christopher G. Moore, Tim Hallinan, John Burdett, Colin Cotterill, and others. Those are the writers I know; I hope to meet more when I take a short side trip to Bangkok.

My guidebook to Cambodia includes a list of suggested reading, and two of the fiction titles are or include crime stories. This raises once again that question of why authors find crime fiction a window through which to view a country other than their own.
 
And how is an author to approach a country that has known such terror as Cambodia so recently has? As soon as I booked my trip, I visited my native informant — a Cambodian-born, French-trained baker and pastry maker in South Philadelphia.  Yes, he talked about Khmer Rouge torture techniques, but he also offered acerbic comments on the technological backwardness that opened his native country to exploitation and on the superiority of the British to the French as colonizers. And there was an element of shocked humor to his discussion of Pol Pot, who spoke impeccable French, yet was responsible for the deaths of untold numbers of foreigners as head of the Khmer Rouge. (A Wikipedia article on Pol Pot says he was forced to return to Cambodia after failing his exams three years in a row. So yes, while hallucinogenic, nightmare horror is appropriate to the story of Cambodia after World War II. there's a place for grim comedy, too. How is a writer to handle this?)

And then there's the woman in the bakery — I'm unsure if she was a worker or a customer — who said matter-of-factly that she had lost three relatives to the Khmer Rouge, but also that she wanted to take her children to Cambodia one day so they could see their ancestral country.  How is an author to portray this complexity of attitudes and reactions?  I'll tell you next month.

© Peter Rozovsky 2015

You do that Urdu you sure do so well: A look at Indo-Pak crime writer Ibne Safi

As I continue my reading of Indian history, here's a repost about an Indo-Pakistani crime writer.

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  I don't know about you, but I can't resist a crime novel whose main action begins with a food fight in a night club:

"A couple of screws in Qasim's brain mechanism came loose, and the very next moment a plate full of meat and watery sauce hit the young man in the face."

 That's from The Laughing Corpse, sixty-second of the late Urdu-language crime writer Ibne Safi's 125 Jasusi Dunya ("The World of Detection" or "The World of Espionage") novels about the aristocratic Col. Ahmad Kamal Faridi (an inspector earlier in the series) and his acid-tongued sidekick, Hameed. (The name Qasim may be mere coincidence, but my favorite line from The Thousand Nights and a Night is "Your wit is as heavy as Abu Qasim's slippers!")

 Blaft Publications of Chennai, India; and Berkeley, California; has translated four of the Jasusi Dunya books into English. The Laughing Corpse has its slapstick moments, but it also has a cool, mysterious, manipulative protagonist in Faridi, and a surprisingly caustic sidekick in Hameed. Most of all, Ibne Safi knew how to create suspense and head-scratching mystery.

Ibne Safi began his writing in India in the early 1940s and continued from Pakistan after the partition of British India in 1947. He wrote through the 1970s and died in 1980. Like many pulp writers of the Indian subcontinent, he was prolific. He wrote more than a hundred titles each in Jasusi Dunya and his other main series, plus poetry and satire.

Read more about the author at the Ibne Safi site. Read more about the fantastically broad and colorful world of Indian pulp writing at Blaft's Web site and in the informative editor's and translator's introductions to the books.

© Peter Rozovsky 2011

Indian crime and proto-crime

(Eighteenth- or nineteenth-century painting
from a classic Hindu proto-crime story.)

I've neglected crime fiction recently in favor of Indian history in the form of Ramachandra Guha, both his essays about important persons and themes in India's 20th-century history and his fat, highly readable volume India After Gandhi. (Is it enough for weighty volumes of history to be "fat" and "highly readable," or is it mandatory that they be called "magisterial"?) In any case, while I burrow deeper into Guha's highly readable majesty, here's an old post about a prolific Indian crime writer that includes some thoughts on his country's literary classics.

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 More good ancillary material from The Blaft Anthology of Tamil Pulp Fiction, this time from a Q&A with Rajesh Kumar:

"Some people don't think crime novels count as literature. My answer to them is that the first crime novel in this world is the Mahabharatham — which has every imaginable sort of intrigue — and the next is the Ramayanam. The great epics themselves depend on rape, molestation, abduction and murder for their plots. It makes me laugh when I am accused of spoiling society with my crime novels."

It is nice to see that an Indian crime writer faces the same moralistic scorn that some of his Western counterparts do. It's nice, too, to see two Hindu epics in the ranks of the world's great proto-crime stories (click link, then scroll down).

Kumar also laments India's poor performance in the country's favorite sport ("Our cricket team is too busy advertising soft drinks, having affairs with film actresses and abandoning their families. Where is the time for practice?") and offers a disarming answer to questioner who asks: "I am suffering from hair loss due to stress. Do you worry about such things?"

"Why should I worry," Kumar replies, "about you losing your hair?"

© Peter Rozovsky 2010

Satyajit Ray, crime writer

You may know Satyajit Ray as India's most famous movie director, but he was also a crime writer, composing a series of wildly popular novels and stories about a sleuth named Feluda. The stories, which appeared from the mid-1960s on, combined wit, liberal sprinklings of Holmes and Poirot, and a sharp eye for contemporary social problems.  I suspect one could do worse than reading these stories as an introduction to modern India. Or at least I think so based on the novella A Killer in Kailash, which first appeared in 1973

First, the story's form. Ray read and admired Sherlock Holmes, and A Killer in Kailash is full of delightful nods to Holmes and to Hercule Poirot. Feluda's cousin Tapesh narrates the stories in an amused, sometimes bemused, manner, like a Bengali Watson. Feluda, surprised by Tapesh's  failure to grasp a clue's significance, tells him that "Even the few grey cells you had seem to be disappearing, my boy. Stop worrying and go to sleep."

(Photo by your humble blogkeeper)

So Ray was a Christie-loving, Doyle-worshiping Anglophile, right?  Not so fast.  A Killer in Kailash is about the despoiling of India's cultural heritage for gain, specifically the theft of a yakshi's head for sale to an American collector. (This made rub my chin thoughtfully, for only weeks before I had ogled and taken pictures of a gorgeous example—in an American collection, above/right.)

So Ray was a Hindu nationalist, right?  Not so fast. At various times in the story, Feluda admits he can't speak Hindi, and Tapesh overhears two men arguing, but "They were probably speaking in Marathi, for I couldn't understand a word."  When Feluda and company board a plane for Bombay, Tapesh notes that none of them had visited that city before. Without anything like didactic intent, the story is a refreshing reminder of the glorious d-------y of Indian society.

A Killer in Kailash offers amused references to Hare Krishnas,  and, quite naturally, a vocabulary lesson or two. Chowkidar (from the Urdu language) is a fine word for night watchman. I'd always liked cheroot, but I never knew until looking it up that the word derives from Tamil, yet another language spoken in India (also in Sri Lanka).  How can a simple detective novella be so thought-provoking, so educational, and so much fun?

© Peter Rozovsky 2015

My Bouchercon 2013 panels: Martin Limón on life after wartime

I chose the name "World War II and Sons" for one of my panels at next month's Bouchercon 2013 in Albany, N.Y., with Martin Limón in mind. His novels and stories chronicle the adventures of two criminal investigators in the U.S Army in 1970s South Korea. They thus have much to say about a war's strange and lingering aftereffects (made even stranger because the Korean War still awaits a final peace agreement).

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Sure, Martin Limón's novels are rollicking tales of two loose-cannon military investigators, but they show considerable and illuminating sympathy for a society recovering from war.

Here’s co-protagonist/narrator George Sueño on a British soldier’s Korean manservant from Slicky Boys, second novel in Limón's series:

“His English was well pronounced. Hardly an accent. I knew he’d never gone to high school — probably not even middle school — or he wouldn’t be working here. He’d picked it up from the GI’s over the years. Intelligence radiated from his calm face. When I first arrived in Korea, I wondered why men such as this would settle for low positions. I learned later that after the Korean War, having work of any kind was a great accomplishment. Even cleaning up after rowdy young foreigners. At that time, the rowdy young foreigners were the only people with money. … Yim seemed lucid, calm, smart, sober. An excellent witness, except that I knew from experience that houseboys were so low on the social scale that nobody took their testimony seriously.”

Here he sees a sign of Korea’s recovery in the surprising beauty of a local “business girl”:

“Over the last few months, more girls like Eun-hi had drifted into the GI villages. More girls who’d grown up in the twenty-some years since the end of the Korean War, when there was food to be had and inoculations from childhood diseases and shelter from the howling winter wind. Eun-hi was healthy. Not deformed by bowlegs or a pocked face or the hacking, coughing lungs of poverty.”

And here are Sueño's thoughts on prostrating himself before a powerful gangster:

"So I’d lowered myself to a common thief. A Korean one, at that. ... Such things didn’t bother me. I was from East L.A. I’d been fighting my way up from the bottom all my life. Herbalist So had power. A lot more than I did. In certain areas, more than the Commander of 8th Army. He deserved respect. This little ceremony didn’t bother me any more than standing at attention in a military formation and saluting some potbellied general with stars on his shoulder.”

There's humor amid the sociology, though. Here’s a look at Sueño’s colleague Ernie Bascom:

“The joint was in the brightly lit downtown district of Mukyo-dong. Outside, a hand-carved sign in elegant Chinese script told it all: The House of the Tiger Lady. A kisaeng house. Reserved for the rich. `This place sucks,’ Ernie said.”

What are your favorite crime novels about the social after-effects of war?

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Martin Limón joins fellow authors James R. Benn, J. Robert Janes, John Lawton, and Susan Elia MacNeal on my "World War II and Sons" panel, Thursday Sept. 19, at 4 p.m., at Bouchercon 2013.

© Peter Rozovsky 2013

Table 35: More from the Edgar Awards

More news from Thursday's Edgar Awards dinner, meat, potatoes, and prizes courtesy of the Mystery Writers of America:

1. I sat at the Soho table again this year, which meant I renewed acquaintances with the affable Ed Lin, whom I'd met previously at Bouchercon 2012 in Cleveland. Back then I'd been interested to learn that he has a novel set in Taiwan upcoming from Soho. This time, talk turned to his three novels set in New York's Chinatown around 1975. Lin said he chose that period because of turbulent events of the time on the Chinese mainland and in Taiwan, with old leaders dead or dying, and the Cultural Revolution drawing to an end.  What does that have to do with a troubled Chinese-American Vietnam vet cop in New York? I don't know, but I'm eager to find out. The novels are This is a Bust, Snakes Can't Run, and One Red Bastard.
2. Dennis Lehane, whose Live By Night won the best-novel Edgar, drew appreciative nods and murmurs for expressing his gratitude to bookstores. He also thanked libraries for putting books into the hands of "a kid from the wrong side of the tracks" free of charge.
3. Ken Follett, named a grand master along with Margaret Maron, displayed an enthusiasm for his work that made me think it must be great fun to write massively successful international thrillers. I haven't read Follett, but I may do so now. And that's what I like best about conventions and other crime-fiction events: Meeting, talking with, or just hearing new (or new to me) authors and, because of those meetings, getting excited about reading their work.

© Peter Rozovsky 2013

Ong-Bak: Muay Thai Warrior is a different kind of kick

Ong-Bak: Muay Thai Warrior (2003), released as Ong-Bak: The Thai Warrior in the U.S., is the first Thai martial arts movie your humble blogkeeper has watched following a host of movies from Hong Kong and South Korea.

I mention this because the fighting style is so noticeably different: more compact, close-in, with much greater use of elbows and forearms. And, when the combatants fly through the air, as combatants always do in such movies,  they often do so horizontally, parallel to the ground.  A fighter is apt to move in close to his opponent, looking about to fly past him, before reaching almost backward to strike with an elbow.

Here's a primer on the muay Thai fighting style that helped me understand why this movie looks different from Chinese and Korean martial arts movies. The movie also is free, for the most part, of Hong Kong-style wire fu.

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Many Asian martial arts movies send a hero from a rural village to a big city to get his job done. Here, young Ting (Tony Jaa), from a village in the northeastern region of Isan (ภาคอีสาน). volunteers to recover the head of the village's Buddha, stolen by a crime lord's henchman and taken to Bangkok.  The evil big-city trope is an old one, and I wonder when it became a part of Southeast Asian popular culture. In any case, this movie's first shots of Bangkok are among the most visually effective I can remember at conveying the frightening cacophony any big city, much less Bangkok, might seem to a newly arrived country boy.

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The movie includes graphic scenes of the use and effects of yaba, which Wikipedia calls "a mixture of methamphetamine and caffeine." At least, that's what Wiki says the drug in question is. The fighters here smoke or inject the drug, though the Wiki article on yaba says it is not commonly injected. In any case, yaba's effects are unpleasant, and the scenes in which it appears constitute a strong anti-message.

Finally, the Buddha. I have only a passing acquaintance with East and Southeast Asian art, but I always had the idea that Southeast Asian Buddhas tended to be more heavy-lidded than their Chinese counterparts, with facial attitudes of pleasantly relaxed, drowsy contemplation (right). The huge head of one such figure forms striking background to the movie's climactic fight.

OK, enough with the sociological and aesthetic blather. I hope I've convinced you that there is much of interest in Ong-Bak even if your movie viewing does not normally include heroes who face down crowds of stick- and knife-wielding thugs and somersault over their heads while kicking the crap out of them. Recommended.

© Peter Rozovsky 2013

Detectives Beyond Borders Night at the Movies

Remember when the family would gather round the television set for Saturday Night at the Movies, seeking to recapture the atmosphere of the big screen? Now you can simulate those golden days here at Detectives Beyond Borders! Here are this evening's presentations:

1) The Glass Key. The 1935 adaptation of Dashiell Hammett's novel, starring George Raft, not the 1943 version with Alan Ladd and Veronica Lake. It features good performances by Raft and by Edward Arnold as political strongman Paul Madvig and lots of knuckle-gnawing by the female leads to indicate nervousness. In spots it captures the narrative intensity of Hammett's great novel, but its ending must be one of the weirdest in Hollywood's long history of tacked-on happy endings.   And why did both movies change the protagonist's name from Ned Beaumont to Ed Beaumont?

2) Private Hell 36. (1954) The cast includes Ida Lupino and Howard Duff, trying his best to look like Sterling Hayden.  The set-up: Two cops split thousands of dollars they recovered from a dead counterfeiter, and complications ensue. The movie is noir until its last two or three minutes, and then it either wusses out and capitulates to the era's demand for moral uplift, or it gets even more noir, depending on one's interpretation. It's a fine, ambiguous ending, in other words, and I wonder if director Don Siegel and the rest of the movie's creative team intended it that way.

3) Once Upon a Time. This 2008 Korean heist comedy is set during Japan's wartime occupation of Korea, which makes the slapstick antics of its Korean freedom-fighter heroes something of a brave move. Several scenes nicely portray Japanese condescension toward even Koreans loyal to the occupying government. Several characters go by both their Korean names and the Japanese names forced upon them by Japanese decree. Surprisingly affecting and resonant for a movie with so much slapstick in it.

4) (Jet Li's) Fearless. This 2006 Hong Kong film is apt to get viewers cheering. A romanticized biography of Huo Yuanjia, a martial artist who took on and defeated foreign challengers at a time when Chinese national pride was at a low ebb and foreign domination at a high.  In the movie, he wins their hearts and friendship in addition to kicking the crap out of them. China's current rulers probably like the character of Nong Jinsun, a businessman friend of Huo's who sells his highly successful restaurant and donates the proceeds and his time to the athletic association Huo founds.

(NB: I'm a Robert Osborne, not a TCM. I'll talk about the movies entertainingly and informatively, but you have to track them down yourselves. The Glass Key is available on YouTube, the rest on Netflix.)

© Peter Rozovsky 2012

Romance of the Three Kingdoms, or a Chinese Malcolm Tucker in the second century

I leapt from Enter the Dragon, pirouetted in slow motion through the air, silk robes swirling, then landed with one toe on Detective Dee and the Mystery of the Phantom Flame before catapulting high into the sky, turning an aerial somersault, and landing on John Woo's 2008 film Red Cliff.

I liked the latter so much that I've started reading Romance of the Three Kingdoms, the classic Chinese novel on which the film is based in part. It's a historical novel of high adventure, recounting battles and political maneuvering in the Three Kingdoms period of Chinese history, the decades of shifting alliances and power struggles that accompanied the decline of the Han Dynasty.

Liu Bei, Guan Yu and Zhang Fei take the Oath of the Peach
 Garden in a 1591 edition of Romance of the Three Kingdoms.

Think a novel so concerned with power struggles can't be entertaining? Here's an adviser speaking boldly to a Han emperor so enfeebled that he has let the palace fall under the sway of eunuchs:

"All the Empire would eat the flesh of the eunuchs if they could, and yet, Sire, you respect them as if they were your parents."

Malcolm Tucker may talk that way, but I suspect few real political advisers do, and that's shame.

© Peter Rozovsky 2012

Magistrate Pao: Chinese crime fiction from the eleventh century

Connoisseurs of exotic crime stories may know of the Dutch author, scholar, diplomat and collector Robert Van Gulik and the stories he wrote about the real-life Tang Dynasty magistrate Di Renjie, or Judge Dee.

Van Gulik translated an eighteenth-century story about the seventh-century Dee, then went on to write a series of original novels and stories featuring Dee. The tales, along with Van Gulik's forthright and illuminating introductions, shed light on Chinese life in the period, on Chinese taste in crime stories, and on the profound differences between those tastes and their Western counterparts.

Dee was not the only magistrate who found his way into Chinese drama, folklore, opera and crime fiction down through the centuries. This week at Sleuth of Baker Street in Toronto, I found The Strange Cases of Magistrate Pao: Chinese Tales of Crime and Detection, a book of stories about the Song Dynasty (960-1279) magistrate Bao Zheng.

Like Dee, Pao was a magistrate, a position in the Chinese imperial system that combined the roles of administrator, mayor or governor, detective, prosecutor, and judge. Like Dee he was so noted for his rectitude that his fame has lived on in popular art for more than a thousand years.

Leon Comber's rendering of the Pao stories offers a hero more interested than Dee in repairing the social fabric torn by crime. In particular, he delights in finding new mates for those bereft by crime (in accordance with the principle from the Chinese classic of Mencius that "Three things are unfilial, and of these the worst is to have no offspring.")

The Wikipedia article on Bao Zheng says that "In his lifetime, Bao was renowned for his filial piety, his stern demeanor, and his intolerance of injustice and corruption." Official corruption continues to be a problem in today's China, though the Dee and Pao stories suggest the problem has been around for centuries.  If murder is the defining crime in Western crime writing, does official corruption occupy a similar place in Chinese crime fiction? If so, I wonder how the old stories resonate in today's China.

Here's an interesting passage from Wikipedia's article on Chinese crime fiction (and isn't it interesting to see that term applied to popular literature so many centuries older than Poe and Conan Doyle?):

"In the Song dynasty, the growth of commerce and urban society created a demand for many new forms of popular entertainment. `Stories about criminal cases' were among the new types of vernacular fiction that developed from the Song to the Ming periods. ... they nearly always featured district magistrates or judges in the higher courts. ... The plots usually begin with a description of the crime (often including much realistic detail of contemporary life) and culminate in the exposure of the deed and the punishment of the guilty. Sometimes two solutions to a mystery are posited, but the correct solution is reached through a brilliant judge."

© Peter Rozovsky 2012

Timothy Hallinan and anger as a motivator in crime fiction

Timothy Hallinan's protagonist Poke Rafferty is a 1960s sitcom father in 2000s Bangkok. We virtually never see him working at his job (he's a travel writer), for example, and we get much about the joys and challenges of life with his unconventional family (He's Asian-Irish, his wife is a Thai ex-bar girl, and their daughter is a former street kid.)

Unlike Fred MacMurray, though, Poke gets angry, and when the darker emotions take over, he becomes an action hero. Here are two short examples from The Queen of Patpong (2010) of Poke working his way up to the metamorphosis:

"Rafferty has dried blood on his hand from when he pushed himself up from the carpet beside Mrs. Pongsiri. The sight of it makes him dizzy with anger."

and

“`You’re nervous,' Arthit says. `You don’t usually natter.' “`It’s not nerves, it’s plain old hatred.'”

Further, circumstantial evidence suggests that anger motivates not just the character, but his creator as well. In 2008, Hallinan told Detectives Beyond Borders that

"The dreadful child abuse – more pornography than prostitution – in A Nail Through the Heart was based on a real guy, a German monster who actually lived in Bangkok and shot there the pictures described in the book. I don't know whether he's dead (although I fervently hope he is), but the pictures seem to have stopped coming."

What other crime protagonists and crime writers are motivated by anger, fury, rage, or hatred? (I'll nominate Andrew Vachss and his several protagonists, including Burke.) How do you feel about anger as a motivator?

(Read both parts of Detectives Beyond Borders' 2008 interview with Tim Hallinan.)

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Tim Hallinan will be part of a panel I'll moderate at Bouchercon 2012 in Cleveland next month. The panel is called "Murder is Everywhere," and it happens Saturday, October 6, 10:15-11:05 a.m. See you there! Here's the complete Bouchercon schedule.

© Peter Rozovsky 2012

Christopher G. Moore's dissipated Scheherazade

Trapped between post-vacation exhaustion and the sheer joy of being back in the daily routine I love so well, I haven't been reading much.

But this passage, from the first page of Christopher G. Moore's 2003 novel Waiting for the Lady, caught my attention for some reason:

"In the ten years I had known Hart, I felt that each year he lost a bit more faith in himself and lost even more faith in the motives and desires of others. That was another way saying that Hart had lost his youth like a bloated giant star that had lost its nuclear fusion just before collapsing in on itself."

The lady of the title is Aung San Suu Kyi, and the book tells the story of the protagonists' quest to meet her. Here's a review of the novel by Kevin Burton Smith (like Moore and me an expatriate Canadian) that calls the book's narrator "a dissipated Scheherazade, prone to self-pity [with] an over-inflated view of his own worth." I hope you find the phrase "dissipated Scheherazade" as beguiling as I do.

© Peter Rozovsky 2012

Hong Kong movies on China's mainland?

Back to Iron Monkey for a moment: What, I wonder, would Communist Party officialdom think of this Hong Kong movie?

On the one hand, the movie’s heroes are based on real-life revolutionaries against China’s last imperial dynasty, the Qing. On the other, the immediate villains are corrupt officials, quite possibly a sore point in Beijing these days. And the movie’s dénouement sounds a hopeful but decidedly cautious note about the arrival of a new governor to replace his venal predecessor. This, in other words, is no rousing allegory of communism coming to save the oppressed peasants.

I’m a tyro when it comes to Hong Kong cinema. Are Hong Kong movies distributed on the Chinese mainland? Does the wider Chinese population get to see them?

(The Wikipedia entry on Iron Monkey, citing as its source the Los Angeles Times, offers information about technical and other changes to the movie for its American release.)

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I visited Hong Kong in 1990, three years before this version of Iron Monkey was made. I remember: an intoxicating afternoon at the Luk Yu teahouse, two young lovers walking down a busy sidewalk hand in hand, each chatting away on a mobile phone, and a visit with Gigi from Macau at the Bottoms Up Club in Tsim Sha Tsui. Years later, the even-then much experienced bar girl will surely look back on that evening as one of the least memorable of her long career.

© Peter Rozovsky 2012

Into the '50s, with a stop in Japan first

I finished Keigo Higashino's The Devotion of Suspect X last night, and I'm impressed by how Higashino built his story. The book offers not just rationality against emotion, but, among the characters governed by their rationality, mathematics against physics. The head investigator has not just a subordinate with whom he forms an amusing team, but a friend and semi-amateur sleuth who is the real force behind the investigation. All this forms a nice background for a tale of seething emotions and their consequences.

The clues all make sense at the end, and Higashino does a nice job planting details that let me flatter myself when I spotted their significance many pages later.

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Speaking of emotions, they're spilling out all over the pages of my other recent reading, and not just of one book, either. I've stocked up on American paperback originals from the 1950s, as reissued by Wonder eBooks and Prologue Books, and all I can say is that all that liquor characters drank in the 1920s and '30s and '40s finally started to hit in the 1950s. If the '20s, '30s and '40s were the boozy party of American crime writing, the '50s were the morning after, with the hangover, the empty pockets, the strange bed, the gutter, the torn clothes, and the utter lack of prospects -- not that some American crime writing of the time wasn't pretty funny. Here are a few bits from some of the books I've been browsing trying to decide what to read next:

"She had been somewhere with someone, but she couldn’t quite remember the place or the person. As a matter of fact she had a feeling that she had been a number of places with a number of persons, but she couldn’t quite remember that for certain either."

Park Avenue Tramp, Fletcher Flora

"(I)t it was a small, sad, lovely face of fine structure in which sadness and loveliness would survive as a shadow of themselves after the erosions of gin and promiscuous love and nervous breakdowns."

ibid.

"She was tall, blackhaired, with creamy skin and what I thought of simply as `Mexican' eyes. Dark eyes, soft, big, shadowed eyes with both the question and the answer in them."

The Sleeper Caper, Richard S. Prather

Before you sneer at "Mexican eyes," think about the words that went before: "what I thought of simply as." Sure, Prather has his protagonist, Shell Scott, engage in what some might call ethnic stereotyping and objectification of women today, but by God, he's redeemed by his awareness of what he's doing and by Scott's enjoyment of this Elena's beauty. And who could resist the melodramatic appeal of a pair of eyes that contain not just answers but also questions? Damned efficient, I'd say.

"You never can tell what a big, tough Polish boy will do when he finds a nude blonde in his bathroom."

To Kiss, Or Kill, Day Keene

Goodnight!

© Peter Rozovsky 2012

The Coffee Ceremony

No one is going to read The Devotion of Suspect X for laughs, but bits have made me smile. My favorite is probably this scene of a physicist welcoming a visit from his police investigator friend:

“Yukawa walked over to a nearby sink, filled a kettle with water, and set it on a gas burner—the start of his usual instant coffee ritual.”

Nothing will convince me that Higashino is not poking a bit of irreverent fun at the Japanese tea ceremony.

© Peter Rozovsky 2012